98 NOVEMBER 4-, 1991 dAZZ biographies, and autobiographies, in- cluding her own hocus-pocus "Lady Sings the Blues.") The second Holi- Lady Day day was the singer, the statuesque presence, standing on the stage with a OIUMUla has released the ninth In June of 1937, Billie Holiday, gardenia in her hair, her elbows bent and final CD of"The Quintes- backed lustrously by Buck Clayton, at her sides, her left hand snapping sential Billie Holiday." The Lester Young, and Jo Jones, made an silently on the afterbeat, her head tilted recordings begin in 1933, when she extraordinary recording of an inconse- back, almost visible music pouring out made her first (very assured) record- quential Tin Pan Alley tune called of her. (This Holiday can be heard, ings with Benny Goodman, and they "Me, Myself and I." The lyric ends, at various removes, in the singing of end in 1942, when a union recording "Me, myself and I are all in love with Frank Sinatra, Julie Wilson, Nancy ban went into effect, and her brilliant you." The song could be a description Harrow, Peggy Lee, and Susannah ingenuousness had begun to harden, of Holiday herself, for she was at least McCorkle.) The third Billie Holiday For the first time, the sessions are three different people. The most fa- was almost invisible. She was the in- complete and in chronological order, mous was the tortured tabloid figure, secure child who, less than twenty Twenty-six of the hundred and fifty- who, desiccated and dying, was ar- years younger than her ineffectual three numbers in the set have been rested in her hospital bed by the New parents, never had the chance to grow unavailable, except on rare 78s, for more York police for possession of drugs, up. Battered by racism, by hoody music- than fifty years. It is now possible to (This Holiday, now largely legend- business people, and by a succession of see the whole beautiful and invaluable ary, is very much with usin movies, manipulative lovers (she married twice), Billie Holiday landscape of the thirties, on the stage, and in novels, poems, she hid behind a violent temper and a 0 - foul mouth, and searched most of her life for solace in drugs and drink. (This Holiday remains as elusive as ever. ) Billie Holiday was born in Phila- delphia in April of 1915 to Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday, unmarried teen- agers. She was raised in Baltimore, and she was a wild one. At ten, she was sent to a Catholic reformatory, the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, and at twelve she was a prostitute. When she was fourteen or fifteen, she moved to New York. She had been singing since she was thir- teen, and several years after she moved north she was discovered in a Harlem club by Mildred Bailey and Red Norvo. Billie made her first important record- ings in 1935, when she sang "I Wished On the Moon," "What a Little Moon- light Can Do," "Miss Brown to You," and "A Sunbonnet Blue" with a small pickup band that included Benny Goodman, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster,  Teddy Wilson, and Cozy Cole. She was already scratching out a living in such Harlem clubs as the Yeah Man, the Hot-Cha, Pod's and Jerry's, the Alhambra Grill, and Dickie Wells's Clam House. Her career was never smooth. She took her first downtown job at the Famous Door, on Fifty- second Street. Working opposite the roughneck white New Orleans trom- bonist George Brunies, she was told not to sit with the customers between setsto stay out of sight. She lasted four days. Then she joined Fletcher Henderson at the Grand Terrace in Chicago; the manager, Ed Fox, shouted